Sermon 7/15/07
Between God and Me - Luke 10:25-37
(view lectionary notes for this text)
In the first week of our movie study, we watched the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, which chronicles the genocide that took place in Rwanda, Africa, in 1994. Three months of bloodshed in Rwanda resulted in over one million deaths in the small country, and the rest of the world hardly took notice. How did this happen? As we learned in the movie, part of the problem was that the international community was very careful not to use the word genocide when talking about what was going on in Rwanda. Genocide is murder of a whole population of people based on religion or race or ethnicity. And if genocide is occurring, the international community through international law has a legal responsibility to get involved. Why didn’t people want to intervene in Rwanda? How could the world sit silently by as one million were killed? That’s a hard question to answer. But world leaders definitely did not see Rwanda as their problem. They didn’t want to get involved. And they sought ways to free them from their legal obligation to intervene, even if they could not avoid their moral and ethical obligation to act.
When are we obligated to act? When must we get involved? That’s a question that comes up in our gospel lesson today – the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is a parable almost everyone knows. In response to questions from a lawyer wanting to test Jesus, Jesus tells the story of a man who was on the road to Jericho from Jerusalem. The man is attacked, robbed, and left for dead. A priest comes by, and crosses to the other side of the road to avoid the man – touching the injured man would have made the priest ritually unclean. The same happened with the Levite – he too crossed to the other side and avoided the man. But a Samaritan – a man from an ethnic group hated by the Jews, and vise versa, because of their differing religious beliefs – a Samaritan stops and is moved with pity – the same phrasing the scriptures so often use when Jesus reacts to the crowds in need or a person needing healing. He goes above and beyond obligation – he bandages the wounds, anointing them with oil and wine, he takes the man on his own animal to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to care for him and give him anything that is needed. This, Jesus indicates, is showing mercy, being a neighbor, and loving God and loving neighbor are the keys to inheriting eternal life. Go, and do likewise, Jesus says.
The road to Jericho from Jerusalem was a dangerous road to travel. As the text says, the road, about 15 miles long, literally went down, a hilly, dangerous descent into Jericho. It was a road where many people experienced violence and crime – being robbed on the road to Jericho wouldn’t have been uncommon. The road to Jericho wasn’t unlike places today – places where you’re smart enough not to go alone, at night, or probably even with other people if you can avoid it. We still have those places today, our own Jericho Road – we could name streets in Oneida on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, right, where we might not want to spend a lot of time. We know the neighborhoods in Utica – like Corn Hill – where we don’t want to go. In fact, when I googled Utica Corn Hill, the first result was a website with people giving warnings about traveling in Corn Hill at night. We know places across the world that are Jericho Roads – in fact, today, most of us would not dare to travel to the Holy Land. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or North Korea. The Jericho Road is the Sudan. It is Rwanda in 1994. We know what the Jericho Road is, without ever having been there. Pastor Edward Markquart writes, “The Jericho Road is any place where there is violence; it is any place where there is oppression; it is any place where people are robbed of the dignity and robbed of their love and robbed of their food and robbed of their freedom. The Jericho Road is always with us. The Jericho Road.” (1)
When are we obligated to act? When must we get involved? When must we stop by the Jericho Road? The lawyer – a doctor of the law – comes to test Jesus in his legal knowledge of how to live faithfully. He asks Jesus about inheriting eternal life, and Jesus turns the question back on the lawyer. Of course, the lawyer answers correctly – love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says we live if we just live by these laws! But the lawyer wants to justify himself – perhaps to show how correctly he obeys the law, or to show how hard the laws are to obey, or just to show how much he knows about interpreting the law compared to Jesus – we’re not sure. But he asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” The lawyer wants his responsibility defined – when must he get involved? When is he obligated to act? And of course, then, the unspoken question is “who isn’t my neighbor?” When am I not obligated to act? When can I not get involved? What’s the least I can do and still get this inheritance of eternal life?
We all ask these questions, don’t we – if not out loud, then in the depths of our heart. My thoughts kept returning this week to the series finale of Seinfeld. I was never really a fan of the TV show, but somehow, I seem to know a lot of the storylines anyway. And in the series finale, the four main characters, George, Kramer, Elaine, and Jerry, are arrested. They were spending time in a small town in Massachusetts when they witness a man being carjacked at gunpoint. Instead of helping the man, they actually film the event with their camcorder and then leave the scene. But apparently, they are violating a Good Samaritan law that requires a person to act to help when witnessing someone in distress. We don’t really have this kind of Good Samaritan law in the US – we do have Good Samaritan laws that protect someone from getting in trouble for helping in an emergency – but other countries do indeed have laws requiring bystanders to help – Israel, Italy, Japan, France, Belgium, and Canada, to know a few. Once arrested, the Seinfeld characters are put on trial, and all the people they’ve mistreated over the years of the sitcom make appearances to testify against them. They are all convicted and sent to jail. The scenario of course is ridiculous. But I keep coming back to it – what if I was put on trial – you were put on trial – for failing to get involved, for failing to help someone in need. Who would testify against you? What line of witnesses would remind you of all the times when you passed by on the other side of the road? I would hate to see a list of times I had failed to act and failed to get involved – it would no doubt put me to shame.
But still, that’s missing the point. What are we obligated to do? When must we get involved? Questions in these terms, these words, is phrasing things like the lawyer would – what must we do? If that’s what we’re asking, we’re missing the point, asking the wrong questions, and we will never get the right answers.
What is being a neighbor? Who is a neighbor? The one who showed mercy is the neighbor, the lawyer knows, as Jesus leads him to see. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says. Mercy by definition can never be an obligation, a must. As Shakespeare’s Portia says in The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of mercy is not strain'd; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” What, then, are we to do? “Go and do likewise,” Jesus tells us. But how? Like the lawyer, we so easily get caught up in living by a list of thou-shalt and thou-shalt-nots, missing out on the heart of the law. How do we become a people of grace and mercy?
One of my least favorite phrases is when someone says “that’s between me and God.” Americans tend to prize individuality and privacy, and our heritage of religious freedom has also resulted in religious isolation – we don’t like to talk to others about what we believe or why, and we tend not to ask others about their beliefs. And so when it comes to many questions of faith – how much we give, how we pray, what sins we have to confess, what we believe about controversial issues – we tend to plead, “that’s between me and God.” I would argue that there’s no such thing. No such thing as “just between me and God.” Jesus and the lawyer alike both knew that the greatest commandments were love of God and love of one another. It’s never just me and God – it’s always me and God and my neighbor. This was a key argument of John Wesley’s, the founder of the Methodist movement. I’ve shared with you before one of my favorite quotes from Wesley, “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness . . . This commandment have we from Christ, that [the one] who loves God, love [neighbor] also." (2) It is never just between us and God.
But on the other hand, maybe we can say exactly that – that our faith is between God and us – that’s exactly it. It is what – and who – lies between God and us that tells us about our faith. What lies between you and God? Jesus’ parable tells us that what lies between God and us is the Jericho Road. If we want to be in a relationship with God, if we want to be disciples, if we want to inherit eternal life, we need to figure out what and who is between us and God. We need to love our neighbors. And we need to understand that between God and us we will find every other human being. Between God and us is every other person in this congregation, each one created in God’s image. Between God and us is every person in every part of the city of Oneida, is every person living in Corn Hill, is every person in Iraq, North Korea, and Rwanda, each one created in God’s image. Between God and us is the road to Jericho, lined with the ones Christ calls our neighbors, lined with the ones God calls us to love.
Jesus asked, “which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
Amen.
(1) Markquart, Edward, Sermons from Seattle, http://www.sermonsfromseattle.com/series_c_the_good_samaritan.htm - (preceding paragraph idea is from Markquart’s sermon.)
(2) Wesley, John. Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems, John Wesley, 1739.